Ping Your Blog for Traffic: A TehTarik Tutorial

Howdy readers!

As I am still gathering my thoughts on writing my new few posts on the days ahead, I decided to stumble about with my previous old post and realized something. Previously, I made a self research post of the various types of "traffic inducing systems" that are used out there (read all about it HERE) and I differentiated those that really make a huge impact on the traffic of your site and those that won't.

However, some of the information I posted there were outdated and are in no longer in use.... (my forgiveness on this....)

So to compensate that mistake of mine, I have compiled a NEW list of things you can do to improve your traffic a bit. I bought some books and did a little reading up and research...

[Not afraid to admit that I am a dummy]

And did some research online for the past couple of months and found out some interesting things. First and foremost not all of us out there are true internet geeks that can really understand the internet language nor are we that internet savvy enough to understand the binary codes that works behind our websites. So I figured it is simpler just to have something that everyone can truly understand for the benefit of their blogs.

Pings

The simplest understanding of a blog is to create attention, IE from either people, feeders and most importantly, web crawler/bots. With pings, what it does is that it mentions to search engines around the world that you have something new and certain keywords would get picked up from there. For me I use a list of ping sites that are user friendly, still running as usual and its easy enough to understand.

Autopinger (from original research) - very easy to use, just put in the URL of your BLOG OR POST into the selection and voila! The one problem about this site is that it targets sites outside of USA (particularly in Japan) which doesn't really suit much on your site market.

Ping-o-Matic!(from original research) - another common favorite however I kinda wonder whether it works because of the speed of the submission itself. Kinda too fast...

Pingates(from original research) - personal favorite of mine simply because that it targets the popular keyword search and in the same time shows you the progress of your ping. However sometimes does have some loading problem every now and then.

PinGoat(from original research) - another good one with the same problem of targeting slightly less popular search sites. Hey, any publicity is good publicity right? :p

PingThatBlog - this baby is like a dictionary of pinging sites. Just submit and watch them go!

BlogPingTool - very basic web based tool. Drawback is that the process might be a little slower in comparison to the rest.

BlogBuzzer- One of the newest one that I research. Barely used it for more than 1 week. Let's see how it works! :D

So some of the more frequent questions that come to me when using blog pings are:

1. How often should you ping your site? - Truthfully not too much, simply because that you wouldn't want search engines to classify your sites as "spam" which will result in your site going lower than it should. Perhaps once a day when you post something new would be good.

2. Are paying ping sites better than the free ones? - Yes and no, reasoning because that paying sites do give you more access to sites however the ones that are offered for free might be sufficient enough to gather the attention that you need.

3. Does this mean that I don't have to update my blog and just keep pinging my site? - Nope, if you keep pinging a pile of crap, then your result will be a pile of crap. Content is CRUCIAL. Read on below.

4. Have I actually tested these sites? - Yes, I took about 7 months constantly testing these sites and they do make a difference. Hence why you Google the word "teh tarik" from anywhere around the world, my humble site comes out on the first page. :D

Once all that is done, ping your site on this motherload of a ping site. The IMT Submitter is something I use religiously but let me warn you, IT TAKES AT LEAST AN HOUR TO FINISH SUBMITTING because of the number of sites it uses. So always use this for the last.

MetaTag, SEO and such

Like I mentioned above, the idea here is to get the attention of the crawlers to your site however they themselves are auto-search-bots (haha i put the word search there so I wont spoof transformers). Which means the very basic structure of the site must already contain keywords that would catch the attention of the crawlers using, MetaTags.

For those of you who does not know what this is, its basically tags that generally describes your site to the world as well as the crawlers to identify what you have in your site. I find there are two ways to maximize your meta site itself.

1. If you have an hour, read up on Matt McGee's basic guide on tags. It seriously did help me understand how to configure your site better which always equals to more traffic!

2. For you lazy bones out there, check out the Submit Express tool to fix your Meta Tag. Its simpler to use but be warned that it would not really push the highest potential for your site itself.

Content

Finally, this is the key fact that you must have in order to have traffic to your post. Every research writing that I have read over the past couple of years hum the same tune: you can't produce nothing when you write about nothing.

One thing I realized that more and more people are now relying on REPRODUCED materials from other sites and calling in their own, which to be honest is crap. Many of them ask me "How can people like Xiaxueand Kenny Sia reach to the heights of their popularity?" My answer is always simple, look for the similarity between these two.

They each have their own unique writing style, personal content and not once have they reproduced something that was done by someone else (without at least giving credit).

I'll write more about this next post!

In conclusion, I still stand firm on my belief that anyone can be a famous or well known blogger, with the right mindset, understanding and tools for it. For me I am not one to keep my secrets to myself, which is the reason why I started this blog to begin with. I have my own ideas and creative writing that I want to share and hopefully people would like it.

Lets face the fact, not all of us would be able to retire early and be rich young right?

[ok fine I am hoping to do so...]

But the fact of the matter is traffic and popularity in blogs can be achieve with some perseverance and originality within the blog. Its hard I know but you'll get there, I'm sure of it. :D